MIDSOMER MURDERS is back and sleepless nights are taking their toll on Inspector John Barnaby

Midsomer Murders is back and sleepless nights are taking their toll on Inspector John Barnaby

It’s an old adage of actors never to work with children or animals. They’re adorable, yes, but also unpredictable. Yet Neil Dudgeon and his co-stars had no choice in the 17th series of ITV’s much-loved cop drama Midsomer Murders. Inspector John Barnaby and his wife, Sarah (Fiona Dolman), already owners of Sykes the dog, add a baby, Betty, to their brood.

It was all down to Fiona’s real-life pregnancy, which was written into the last series of Midsomer – her daughter, Maddie, was born in summer 2013.

A Barnaby baby suddenly makes filming a lot more complicated, says Neil, who replaced John Nettles as Midsomer’s lead cop in 2011. “We use twins and trying to stop just one of the babies crying and the dog from running off the set and them both to look the right way is hard.

My kids love Midsomer Murders. They like what everybody else does – the great stories and the countryside

Neil Dudgeon

“If you want the dog to come in with a newspaper and put it on my lap and me to give a spoonful of food to the baby, it takes all day. We just get on with it, and the babies are gorgeous,” he says.

Father-of-two Neil says it reminded him of having his own children, Joseph, 11, and Greta, nine, with his wife, radio producer Mary Peate. “The thing that surprised me about the twins while filming is that they seemed so tiny,” he muses. “I got used to carrying my own babies, but with somebody else’s a few years later you hold them like they’re a stick of dynamite while thinking ‘I’m going to drop them! Hold the head!’”

Neil was nonetheless pleased with the new challenges that fatherhood has brought to his role as Barnaby. “He loves having a baby, obviously, as we all do, but they both find it a bit of a shock,” says Neil. “Barnaby is pretty hands-on, getting involved with the feeding and changing of nappies and it’s a great opportunity to show his caring and lovely side.”

Coming home to a beautiful daughter is a welcome respite for Barnaby after a day on the killing fields of Midsomer. What looks like a bucolic corner of England has a murder rate to rival a war zone. The county of Midsomer is a dangerous place, where death stalks the leafy lanes and life insurance premiums must be through the roof.

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Neil Dudgeon as John Barnaby with Fiona Dolman as his wife, Sarah

Not only that, but murders there are bizarre. Midsomer’s unique selling point is baroque killings that lend a certain tongue-in-cheek air to the drama – nowhere else in TV fiction does death occur by a falling wheel of cheese or by the starting handle of a vintage car.

“It’s a thing I’ve always loved about Midsomer Murders even before I was involved in it,” says Neil. “If you mention a cop show where somebody dies via a roulette wheel, you know it’s not Scott & Bailey.

“There’s a locked, padded room somewhere where somebody’s working out all these insane ways of killing people.”

This week’s first of four episodes features the unfortunate gambling incident – a woman is fatally electrocuted by a booby-trapped roulette wheel at a crime festival. Later episodes feature a man drowned in a bowl of eggs and eels and a woman crushed to death by a giant Perspex box during a magic show.

Luckily, Barnaby and his sidekick, DS Charlie Nelson (Gwilym Lee) have a knack for crime-busting, and it doesn’t take them long to point the finger of blame.

The upcoming series is Neil’s third in the full-time role of Barnaby after making his name in the sitcom Life Of Riley and dramas Common As Muck and The Mrs Bradley Mysteries. Although Midsomer has turned Neil into a household name, he tends not to capitalise on it to secure other roles between series.

“I’m absent from home for five or six months while we’re filming and miss a lot of getting the kids to school and giving them their tea,” explains Neil. “So I spend the bulk of my time between series doing dad things and I don’t go out of my way to seek lots of other work.”

Neil has finally allowed his kids to watch him in Midsomer after their school friends said they’d watched it.

“We whizz through certain bits that might corrupt them, although a lot of it goes over their heads,” says Neil.

“They love it. They like what everybody else does – the great stories and the countryside.”